Planned Feature Balancing and Repurposing Reputation Gain

If you sell your cannons first and then sell the ship you get more value out of the ship

Improving your rep is way too easy with all those "this meeting realy enlightened me" encounters, since you get +1 and the same for 1 trading quest

you can buy yourself level 10 in almost ever skill with those books since you can more then one of the same type. EDIT: i guess i was wrong here, i maybe had another item effecting the same skill- sorry

not sure of that but putting your main wealth inside ships chest seems to let you be a billionaire without having to sign articles

ive got a "2" Frigate and a "5" Pinace and captured saint pierre fort. got 8.000.000 ransom money. wayyyy too op considering how easy it is to capture a fort EDIT: i do play on adventurer and i did some more "testing". there are forts you simply cannot capture with the said ships. Saint domingue for example. but i did capture port jamaica with only my "2" Frigate (bc i sold my Pinace) and ive got way to much gold for that. pirate settlements almost give the same amount and are way easier in comparison

What level are you playing at? It gets more difficult on the higher levels like swashbuckler. I don't buy most of the books and stuff as they are only needed at the beginning of the game.

"This meeting really enlightened me" doesn't increase your reputation. Only if the person then drops a purse and you say to be careful do you then get +1 reputation. There's also a chance that the person will pick your pocket. Keep it up and you're going to have a reputation of "Hero" and no money or valuables.

Do multiple copies of a book give you multiple increases in the relevant skill? Setting aside for the moment reports I've seen elsewhere on this forum that some of them don't actually give you the bonus they're supposed to, I always thought you got the bonus for having the book regardless of how many copies you have. Anyway, you can buy yourself level 10 in every skill by another method - hire officers!

I don't know if it's been fixed, but the morale system used to be broken such that after you had signed articles, if you had plenty of money and a high reputation you could go on for ages without having to divide plunder. I was cruising around in a super-xebec for years without paying the crew a penny, and they were still at maximum morale.

How did you manage to capture a fort with just a frigate and a pinnace? Last time I tried that, I was losing guns too often and not knocking out fort guns often enough. (Admittedly I didn't have a pinnace. I had a second frigate, the flushdeck which was my ship and the Mefisto which I'd taken by completing the "Strange Happenings" quest. I lost most of my guns and the Mefisto lost most of its hull before I decided this wasn't going to work and reloaded a saved game.) Having said that, I've never seen a Tier 2 frigate - they tend to be Tier 4. Tier 2 is the big battlewagons and I can take a fort with those, though big forts like Guadeloupe nearly sink me before I knock out the last guns. The problem is that if you make it too difficult to capture a fort then it's going to mess up the part of the standard storyline where you are required to capture Bridgetown fort.

Chatting with townfolk increases leadership and luck, especially at the lower levels. I chat a LOT early on.

One copy gives one bump. More copies do nothing.

Yeah, I found that it takes 18 pound cannons at the minimum to hit a fort. 12 pounders didn't work for me and I need three ships anyway.

Grey Roger said:

"This meeting really enlightened me" doesn't increase your reputation. Only if the person then drops a purse and you say to be careful do you then get +1 reputation. There's also a chance that the person will pick your pocket. Keep it up and you're going to have a

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aaand because of every conversation is kinda the same, you end up pressing the same buttons always getting your money back and +1rep in under 5 sec.

Hylie Pistof said:

One copy gives on bump. More copies do nothing.

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Really? Hmm maybe i had another item effecting the same skill then

Hylie Pistof said:

What level are you playing at?

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there are 4 i think. 1 easy 4 hard i play on 2- its adventurer, right?

yeah i played on 4 and 3 but i always failed at melee combat so i became frustrated and started a new game with 2.
sea battles are way easier then melee combat

ContraProductive said:

not sure of that but putting your main wealth inside ships chest seems to let you be a billionaire without having to sign articles

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You sure? That shouldn't work anymore....

ContraProductive said:

you can buy yourself level 10 in almost ever skill with those books since you can more then one of the same type. does the game code allow to fix that? maybe you can think of a workaround. i hate to be my judge- i always use every possible way to make me rich

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While some skill items do stack, books don't. In fact, I think only the Albatross does because that one is evil!
Also, you can only get +4 or -4 from skill items; everything else has to be from your real skills. So no, you can't get 10 just from items.

What version are you playing? See your compile.log.

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ContraProductive said:

not sure of that but putting your main wealth inside ships chest seems to let you be a billionaire without having to sign articles

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Pieter Boelen said:

You sure? That shouldn't work anymore....

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hmm i got more then 800.000 and ive got the quest to sign articles and an info, that if i dont the crew becomes treacherous. so i put my wealth (most of it) in ship chest and had no problems since.
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Pieter Boelen said:

While some skill items do stack, books don't. In fact, I think only the Albatross does because that one is evil!
Also, you can only get +4 or -4 from skill items; everything else has to be from your real skills. So no, you can't get 10 just from items.

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as i said..

ContraProductive said:

Really? Hmm maybe i had another item effecting the same skill then

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but.. would be cool to not get them in like every store. maybe you can change it so, that books and special items are only available when hunting treasures. so that you would, with a certain chance, get a certain special item in the treasure chests. that would give me a very good reason to accept/buy treasure maps from strangers. AAND it would extand the gameplay experience
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DavyJack said:

What version are you playing? See your compile.log.

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Build 14 Beta 3.3: 21 Sep 2014




Edited the main (1.) post...

Items\initItems.c controls where they appear.
Maximus_functions.c contains the treasure quest code.

Is there still anything that needs to be done with the above?

Dunno. This is a personal preference thing. The whole system got radically changed and there has been no feedback. I sometimes give things to an officer to boost him up, but otherwise don't use them.

What system has been massively changed? And what would you reckon needs rebalancing?

It's all the new items added to boost perks. There are lots of new boosts and nothing to hurt you. What about re enabling the cursed coins?

The cursed coins are still there. Only on Realistic Game Mode they don't actually trigger the curse.

How many new items were added? I think it was like 5 or so? Indeed that does make it perhaps too easy to gain high skills.
Perhaps we should just decrease the MAX_SKILL_INCREASE value? Right now it is 4, which on a scale from 1-10 is quite a bit!

IMO the only skill that needs perks is sailing as that one never advances, but it NEEDS the sextant, compass, and clock to see your ship on the map, so it is ok for me. It kinda balances out.

Probably better would be to cut down the amount of increase a perk gives so that instead of a 15% or 25% increase it gives a 5% increase.

Sailing might have to be rebalanced then.

Would be cool to figure out how to give the skills a 1-100 scale instead of 1-10. Then you CAN'T max out any time soon.
I suspect that would be a big change though, because the game does assume that 10 is the max.

Can one actually max your skills out using those "interaction" options? I know you get loads of "Leadership" from simply paying your crews wages every time, I was wondering how in the world I keep maxing my skills out all of a sudden.

There is a few "AddPartyExpChar" in some scripts, one in the "salary.c" for example, when you pay the crew it gives "AddPartyExpChar(PChar, "Leadership", sti(PChar.repeat_salary_payment)*500);".

I prefer the old skill style (need that "Luck"!), I'm smuggling a lot, need Luck high up earlygame.

Luck on the new skill system goes up painfully slow, so doing the trick with "quicksave-load-load-load-load-load-load....." just to avoid that soldier-raid on the beach and sea-battle after you sell your smuggled wares, can cause the current game session to become unstable (it seems), I've had it crash quite a few times after quickloading the game 20-30 times in a row.

Hylie Pistof said:

It's all the new items added to boost perks. There are lots of new boosts and nothing to hurt you. What about re enabling the cursed coins?

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I love those items , had no idea anybody wanted feedback on them

ContraProductive said:

Improving your rep is way too easy with all those "this meeting realy enlightened me" encounters, since you get +1 and the same for 1 trading quest

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I agree, will look into this.

ContraProductive said:

ive got a "2" Frigate and a "5" Pinace and captured saint pierre fort. got 8.000.000 ransom money. wayyyy too op considering how easy it is to capture a fort EDIT: i do play on adventurer and i did some more "testing". there are forts you simply cannot capture with the said ships. Saint domingue for example. but i did capture port jamaica with only my "2" Frigate (bc i sold my Pinace) and ive got way to much gold for that. pirate settlements almost give the same amount and are way easier in comparison

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Some forts might need to be balanced a bit maybe, what do other people think about this?
I made seperate topics for the other things

Some forts have nasty corners where it is only possible at a certain position to destroy a cannon.. I can make a detailed list if you want^^

Also already said that BP and QAR have too weak Hulls compared to other ships with the same size.

For myself, I balanced a few things too:

- adjusted the cannondamage. Is a bit more linear in my files. I also reduced the amount of gunpowder you need, since it sometimes filled my whole cargo
- completely redone all meleeweapons (Blocking-stats)
- adjusted the starting HP, HP per level and enemy-levels in internalsettings.h Most characters have now more logical HPs (no 300-500HP anymore).
- removed this one-day-skip when a hour passes, replaced it with an add of 1-3 hours (game sometimes skips more). Feels better for me, since it was quite odd to imagine that you need 3 days from port entrance to your anchorplace^^